Happy 10th! Robyn Sarah on The Lily Pond

Sometime in 2007, fellow Biblioasis writer Mike Barnes sent me, in manuscript, an essay he’d just written called “Two Rooms”, asking for my response.  From the first paragraph, I found it electrifying, astonishing, and (remarkably) strangely beautiful despite its harrowing subject matter. It described his hospitalization, in his early twenties, following a bizarre self-mutilation, and what came after: misdiagnosis, two years of failed drug trials, electroshock treatments, a staff meeting that nearly saw him transferred to a long term care facility; then months of near-coma resulting from a prescription dosage error.  “Two Rooms” was the genesis of The Lily Pond: A  Memoir of Madness, Memory, Myth and Metamorphosis (Biblioasis, 2008), a series of four interlocking personal essays that probe the impact of mental illness on a life over a period of thirty years.

The Lily Pond is a one-of-a-kind book.  It is so much more than a book about mental illness; it could hardly be further from a self-help book or a popular-style “recovery memoir”. There is not a buzz-word to be found in it, not a single stereotype or oversimplification, not a second’s pandering to the voyeuristic impulse of a public hungry for sensational true stories. No sermonizing, no self-congratulation.  Instead, with humbling honesty, and bringing a formidable intelligence to bear on the subject, Barnes gives us a rare inside look at mental illness and its treatments, interweaving autobiography with reflections on paintings, literary works, myth, metaphor, and scientific lore.  His interest is in the psyche’s resources for healing and in the universals of the human condition as filtered through the particulars of his life experience. His book is, perhaps more than anything, a work of philosophy and a testament to human resilience and creativity.

One of the things I love in The Lily Pond is the voice in which the essays unfold: measured and sober, meditative, freeassociative, often mesmerizing, yet enlivened by unexpected turns of the imagination (think Oliver Sacks, think W. G. Sebald.)   It’s a book that digs deep and wakens wonder – a deep-sea dive of a book, able to pull me in again and again to surface each time with an enriched appreciation of the things that matter in life. 

Happy 10th: Douglas Glover on Adderson, Barnes, Blaise, Flood, Helwig, Jernigan, Rooke, Smith and ... well ... Biblioasis

Below in the first of a series of appreciations that have begun to come in from readers as part of Biblioasis's 10th anniversary highlighting the important writers and books from Biblioasis's past.  More will follow, at 2-3 per week, over the next several months.

Biblioasis is a life boat, rescuing passengers from the sinking (always) ship of a culture steering headlong towards the tsunami of our murky future (the new). Some of the passengers rescued mean a lot to me as a writer, person and thinker. John Metcalf's hilarious early fiction, anything by the astonishing Leon Rooke, David Helwig (poetry, fiction, and that amazing Chekhov translation), Clark Blaise -- to tell the truth, not much of the new stands up to these giants. Of the newer variety, Caroline Adderson and Cynthia Flood will be read long after the deluge. I deeply admire the elegance and wit of Russell Smith and, of course, there is the often overlooked Mike Barnes, a Canadian original, a world original. And the holy poetry of Amanda Jernigan. These are my companions in the night. --Douglas Glover

Further appreciations can be sent to Dan Wells at dwells@biblioasis.com, and will be published on Thirsty and elsewhere in due course.

Claustrophilia: An Interview with Mike Barnes, by KD Miller

Morning, folks, and happy Thursday. Wanted to direct your attention to a lovely bit of conversation between KD Miller and Mike Barnes that's running in the latest TNQ. And as a teaser here's a piece that I especially liked (not least of all because KD herself has a collection called All Saints scheduled for release with us this spring—sshhhh!):

Art has its saints, its martyrs, its holy fools, to be sure. But they’re rare. Their fame obscures that fact. Or underlines it. For the most part, art is—must be—practiced from a position of relative affluence. Not necessarily material, needless to say. But without some surplus of energy, of resources, there is no art. To make a medieval analogy, while there may be art in the upper reaches of hell—cries from those ascending or descending—there is none at the bottom.

For the full interview, click here.

Manitoba Steps Up; Petersen Dives Under

See that guy? Right there? He's wondering
when his Spring 2013 catalogue will arrive.

Greetings and salutations, my friends. Three new morsels for the BiblioBlog: first, a delightful explication of Craig Boyko's Psychology and Other Stories from The Winnipeg Review; second, Manitoba's Canadian Materials has assessed Mike Barnes's The Reasonable Ogre, and its contribution to YA & teen lit; and third, Alice Petersen's native land has coughed up its first review (in The Landfall). 

So what exactly do they all say? For starters: "All the Voices Cry announces itself early on as something of a gift ... The authorial voice, far from being elusive, is sharply, poetically present."

Yup.

"The Reasonable Ogre … is intellectually engaging and filled with haunting pieces of art that beautifully complement each story." 

Yup.

"Bokyo’s insights and criticisms into psychology as a profession are biting, but never disrespectful … This shows Boyko’s control over subtlety and his talent as a writer of nuance. Psychology and Other Stories tickled my cynicism just right."

Anybody else have a cynical bone? Tee hee.

Largehearted Ogres

Afternoon, all, and happy Friday. Because nothing says Thanksgiving like lawyer-eating ogres (??), I thought I'd send you off to your long weekends with Mike Barnes's Reasonable Ogre playlist, which just went up on the Largehearted Boy site today. What's stimming? What's stemming? What songs can Mike Barnes listen to 80 times in a day and why? Find out here.

For those of you who haven't yet seen The Draught yet, issue 2 just went out yesterday, and you can take a little swig online. It's harvest-festival-themed. Enjoy your tofurkey stuffing, all: we hit the ground running on Tuesday with the Caboto Club Cookbook launch and we're in Office-Moving-Crazy-Land for the next week or two, but we're still going to keep you posted on all our happenings. Phone number remains the same. Should be in and nesting by the 15th.

The Vancouver Sun on Mike Barnes

"David Sedaris and Douglas Coupland have recently written wry modern takes on the fable," remarks Brett Josef Grubisic for the Vancouver Sun, "but with The Reasonable Ogre, Mike Barnes whirls together strands of vintage literary DNA — from Aesop, Poe, Perrault, [to] O. Henry ... — with his own light-and-dark sensibility. The result? An entertaining and alluring volume with appeal for adults and children alike."

Check out the Vancouver Sun this Saturday for the rest of the review, which also features Heather Birrell's Mad Hope.

On The Reasonable Ogre in the National Post (with apologies to Charlize Theron).

"To read a fairy tale," writes Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer as a special to the National Post, "is to enter a collective dream space. The stories have lost and accrued material. One must suspend a sense of authority at all — of narrative positioning, of who and why a story might have survived ... They entrance us with their superficiality."

With Snow White and the Huntsman grossing something like $56.2 million on its opening weekend (June 3rd), and with the film presently standing as the second-highest grossing movie at the foreign box office (surpassed only by Madacascar 3), Kathryn's point is hard to argue. Even the subverted fairy tale--once the exclusive terrain of pungently political fiction writers like Angela Carter--is now being co-opted by the mainstream. "Strongly influenced by a lot of smart, feminist thinking," says New York magazine of Snow White. (Because the heroine spends the film running from, instead of sleeping through, her stepmother's vanity-driven genocide campaign?) And here's the LA Times: "[the film is] an absolute wonder to watch and creates a warrior princess for the ages. But what this revisionist fairy tale does not give us is a passionate love - its kisses are as chaste as the snow is white."

It seems that the 2012 theatre-going public wants something like An Affair to Remember plus Xena. It's easy to dish up. Especially because--as Maria Tatar writes in The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, and as Kuitenbrouwer cites in the Post--"fairy tales are invested above all in surfaces, in everything that glitters, dazzles and shines." In that respect there's no genre better suited to the silver screen. 

"Still," Tatar continues, "[fairy tales] give us the psychological depth, even when the characters are described only in terms of surfaces. … As the stereotypical plots of fairy tales churn with melodramatic fervor, they also sparkle with surface beauty. The result is something I will call ignition power — the ability to inspire our powers of imagination so that we begin to see scenes described by nothing more than words on the page.”

The point of all this, of course, being that Kuitenbrouwer thinks Mike Barnes's The Reasonable Ogre has ignition power and then some. "We do not live in reasonable times," she says, and Barnes "[uses] the comfort of the old stories — their cliché and predictability — to discuss ... climate change, war, economic ruin and moral laziness. The 12 stories that comprise this collection are marvellous in the truest sense. They are strange and dark, unpleasant and open-hearted, by which I mean my deepest compliments."

Check out the whole review in this weekend's Saturday Post, or online here. Beyond being a thoughtful look at Mike's work it's a nice intro to the nature of the modern fairy tale,  and features doffs of the cap to A. S. Byatt, Sara Maitland, Italo Calvino, Kate Bernheimer, Angela Carter, and Oscar Wilde. 

In other words? Dwarves, schwarves. Mike, you're in the company of giants. 

Good Grief, GoodReads!

Hey folks! As you can see, we're doing a few more GoodReads Giveaways over the next two weeks. Sign up to win free copies of our spring Bibliobooks! Giveaways should go live within the next 48 hours, so if it isn't working immediately, please check back soon.

Biblioasis at the Bookshelf, TONIGHT

Morning, all, and happy Monday! We hope anyone within spitting distance of granola-town--by which I of course mean Guelph, that recycler's paradise, that urban spa, that city on the hill for composting cosmopolitans--will stop by The Bookshelf tonight for a bang-up Bibliomnibus Night. We're bringing you five authors, all at once, all for free! Come support the bibliocrew and the stupendous Dan Evans: indefatigable bookseller, charming radio host, and (it would seem) impromptu tour guide. AK's in Guelph as we speak and the rest will descend shortly! 

WHAT: Biblioasis at the Bookshelf: An Evening of Poetry & Fiction

WHERE: The Bookshelf, 41 Quebec St., Guelph

WHEN: Monday May 14th, 7 p.m.

Admission is free. Please contact tmurphy@biblioasis.com if you have any questions.   

THE LINE-UP:

Mike Barnes: The Reasonable Ogre

The author of seven books including poetry, short fiction, novels and a memoir, Mike Barnes has received many honours for his writing.  Calm Jazz Sea was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for poetry and Aquarium won the Danuta Gleed Award for best first book of short stories in Canada.  His short fiction has won a National Magazine Awards Silver Medal and appeared in the prestigious Best Canadian Stories (twice)and Journey Prize Anthology (three times).  Since the early 1970s Mike Barnes has also lived with mental illness, a story he told for the first time in his memoir The Lily Pond. His most recent book, The Reasonable Ogre, is a collection of adult fairy tales, and has been called by Fairy Tale Review founder Kate Bernheimer "a marvel, and a tribute to the power of story." For more information please visit www.reasonableogre.com. 

Alex Boyd: The Least Important Man

Alex Boyd writes poems, fiction, reviews and essays, and has published work in magazines and newspapers such as The Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire, and on websites such as Nthposition. His first book of poems Making Bones Walk (Luna Publications, 2007) won the Gerald Lampert Award. He edits the online poetry journal Northern Poetry Review, and recently helped establish Best Canadian Essays. His second collection of poetry, The Least Important Man, was released from Biblioasis in spring of 2012.

Liliana Heker: The End of the Story

Liliana Heker is a Jewish-Argentinian author and intellectual, known for her outspoken protests against state violence during Argentina's Dirty War (1976-1983). At a time when many writers and journalists fled the country to escape persecution, Heker remained, and argued the necessity of bearing witness to state atrocities. 

   Made famous at first by the public polemic she had with the great Argentine writer Julio Cortázar (then living in Paris), Heker’s short fiction has since been anthologized in over a dozen countries. Her collected stories was released by Alfaguara in 2004. The End of the Story, which provoked enormous public controversy over how best to remember the years of the Argentine dictatorship, is her second work to appear in English.

Amanda Jernigan: Groundwork

Amanda Jernigan is a poet, playwright, essayist, and editor. Her works have been published in Canada, the United States and Germany, and are represented in the online archive of the Poetry Foundation. Groundwork, which was selected as a Top-Five Book of Poetry for 2011 on NPR.org, was commended this January by David Orr: "Jernigan," he says, "possesses daunting formal skill ... her lines have an emotional intensity that is no less memorable for being understated. And she has a light, perfecting touch."

Anakana Schofield: Malarky

"Malarky spins and glitters like a coin flipped in the air—now searingly tragic, now blackly funny. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant."—Annabel Lyon, author of The Golden Mean

"This is the story of the teapot-wielding 'Our Woman': fretful mother, disgruntled farmwife, and—surprisingly late in life—sexual outlaw/anthropologist. Everything about this primly raunchy, uproarious novel is unexpected—each draught poured from the teapot marks another moment of pure literary audacity."—Lynn Coady, author of The Antagonist

Anakana Schofield is an Irish-Canadian writer of fiction, essays, and literary criticism. She has contributed to the London Review of Books, The Recorder: The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society, the Globe and Mail, and the Vancouver Sun. She has lived in London and Dublin, and now resides in Vancouver. Malarky, which was selected as a Summer 2012 Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, is her first novel. 

The Reasonable Ogre on (not under!) The Bridge

A few more tidbits from last week, which saw The Reasonable Ogre brought to life. To the right are some pictures from the book launch and art exhibit held at Type: you can also listen online to the interview that Mike gave to Bob Steele of CBC Windsor's The Bridge. It's a great introduction to Mike's approach to the genre of fairy tales.

Last but not least, Mike Barnes has a wonderful feature now up on Numero Cinq. It includes a write-up by Doug Glover, a full story with illustrations, links to audio recordings, and a pretty spiffy picture of Mike standing beside a corpulent brass backside in Trafalgar Square.

The Phog Lifts

Morning, all. Or afternoon is it? We're all in a daze here, now that the authors have left us. There was a small but impassioned crowd last night at the Phog: they sighed along for poor Stephen when Sabrina Donaldson (that dreadful girl!) poached his soccer MVP award; they learned, delightedly, what boustrophedonic means; and they're all now wiser in the art of eluding royal huntsmen. Here are some photos from the event (taken for us by the inimitable Marty Gervais). More on tonight's reading soon! In the meantime: Claire Tacon (In the Field), Amanda Jernigan (Groundwork), and Mike Barnes (The Reasonable Ogre). 

Catch, by Amanda Jernigan

Today's poem will be no stranger to subscribers of CNQ, nor (as of yesterday) to readers of The Malahat Review. Here's a taste of what Malahat has to say about Amanda's poem:

“Catch” stacks layers of meaning in a deceptively simple moment: a game of catch between a father and son. Father and son have a biblical resonance where passing the ball is, metaphorically, the move from Old Testament to the New Testament, from the alpha of Genesis to the omega of Revelations (she could also intend Adam and Cain or Abel, with Adam passing on original sin). Because the ball is “in the shape / of the sun,” both modern science and classical myth intervene—the red giant sun will “eat / its children” like the Titans of classical mythology. The present moment of the poem steps out of biblical scenes; the speaker’s astronomical knowledge is an obvious clue, but the poem works as well as it does because the ideas harmonize so effectively with the rest of the sequence.

Get it? Taste? Who'd have thought paedophagia was this week's blog theme. A neat bit of cutlery-work, that review: and if you're out there, Chris Jennings, know that you had me at "Milton." Oh dear.

Amanda Jernigan and her deceptively simple child-eating poems are of course on their way to Windsor RIGHT NOW, for a reading at the Phog Lounge. Yes that's right. I'm STILL TALKING ABOUT IT. Amanda Jernigan, Mike Barnes, and Claire Tacon all pass through Windsor's orbit tonight at 7 PM, and I for one can't wait. Come one, come all. My father was holding a ball in the shape / of some fun ... 

The Reasonable Ogre Hits Windsor, Toronto

"ONCE there was an ogre who was like all other ogres except in one respect: he was reasonable. He could see more than one point of view, and he liked to argue and discuss. People seldom realized this, however, since he looked like any other ogre, huge and frightening, and he spent his time doing what every other ogre does: grabbing passersby and stuffing them in his mouth."


So begins the latest collection by Danuta Gleed-winning short story writer Mike Barnes. As you know, Biblioasis is launching The Reasonable Ogre tomorrow, April 24th, at Phog Lounge, and on Thursday--yes, Thursday, I said Thursday, I swear I meant Thursday all along--Mike and Segbingway have their Toronto launch at Type Books. We'd be delighted if you joined us.


(Once there was an Ogre-Publicist who lived at the crossroads just three brooks down and a valley west of the Bibliomanse. He wasn't very reasonable but he was full of ideas. He said when we have events we should just carry people in off the street: in fact, he offered to do it himself for a modest fee. But since Ogre Publicity has gone up in price--the industry standard's now fifty gold dubloons with unlimited snacking--we decided to go with Glinda instead, whose rates for enchanted emails are really quite affordable, and who has a strict policy against eating patrons on-site. She even throws in a free babysitting service for kids 12 and under.)


If you're in Windsor or Toronto this week, do come. Tuesday's billet includes Amanda Jernigan, Pat Lowther-shortlisted poet, and Claire Tacon, winner of the 2011 Metcalf-Rooke Award for fiction.  Thursday's event includes an exhibit of Segbingway's original brush paintings, which are, as you can imagine, absolutely fascinating up close. Fairy Tale Review founder Kate Bernheimer has called The Reasonable Ogre "a tribute to the power of story," and remarked that "the illustrations and language are so entwined as to be inseparable." Altogether? We're in for a couple of magical nights.


(Pudgy children especially welcome.)


Yours with a wiggle of the nose,
T. Murgatroyd,
Chief Witch & Master of Digital Wizarding,
The Bibliomanse.

The Benefactions of the Muse

Morning, folks. Rise and shine! Another new day at the Bibliomanse; another new-old poem; another dozen or so events to rhapsodize about before you all get on with the business of the day. Today's theme, as we prepare to cogitate upon the sublime chaos that is May, is the farewell to sleep (Get up, get up for shame)! Along with Mr. Herrick, Bartholomew the Englishman/D. Solway have a few things to say about how best to bid Morpheus good night. Here's hoping his advice is sage ... especially since Bartholomew's cure for lethargy ain't exactly a walk in the park. (Lethargic types--especially poets and lovers of women--are to "be brought into a light and airy place / and drawn into wrangling and disputation / and tugged by the hair of [the] beard / and a clyster applied to [the] genitives." Anointing with mustard and a frenzied quaking of flesh to follow. Who knew? I'd rather be shook and called sweet slugabed, myself.)

Anyhow. The point is there are better things than sleep upcoming. Josh Trotter in Newfoundland, today. Ray Robertson in Barrie, tomorrow. On Sunday at 11:30 Ray Robertson is speaking about Writing and Happiness at the Blue Met Festival in Montreal. And THEN the mustard frenzy REALLY begins:

Tuesday April 24, Biblioasis's Spring Reading at Phog Lounge, Windsor: with Mike Barnes, Amanda Jernigan, and Claire Tacon
Wednesday April 25, Claire Tacon and Alex Boyd, Live at the London Music Club, London
Thursday April 26, The Reasonable Ogre Hits Type: A Book Launch/Art Exhibit for Mike Barnes & Segbingway (Type Books, Toronto)
Thursday April 26, David Hickey will be reading with Penn Kemp and a few others at the Poet Laureate and Friends event at the London Public Library (Central Branch).

Claire Tacon, moreover, will be reading at the Plan 99, Art Bar, and Virus Reading Series between April 29th and May 5th, and on May 7th, Alice Petersen will be launching All the Voices Cry at the Atwater Library in Montreal (with Chantel Lavoie).

So. That takes us to the end of the first week of May. The second week of May? You'll just have to see that malarky to believe it. Eh?

We'll have more information here on Thirsty closer to the dates. In the meantime, for full events listings, please see our Biblioasis Events Page.


Waking

from The Properties of Things (The Poems of Bartholomew the Englishman), 2007.

Bad waking is other than incontinence of sleep
but is a superfluity in the composition of man
and comes from evil matter grieving the brain
as in those disposed to melancholy;
and sometime it comes of grumous substance
and gloomy moistures in the brain
as in old, forlived men;
and sometime from great repletion and bad digestion
and sometime from craving and overdrinking.
For in this especially the sharp smoke of wine
sticks and pricks the sinews of feeling
and such men are often disposed to woodenness.
Excessive waking is to be avoided
for it dries the eyes and weights the eyelids
and enfeebles the sight and breeds headaches
and finally destroys the body.
But measured waking is nothing else
than the imbruing of spirit
into the limbs of feeling and moving
and working of the animate virtue of the body;
and abstinent waking prepares the soul
to receive benefactions of the Muse
and bring the work to completion
as did the Lord
who lugged the clayform out of darkness;
and moderate waking cools the body from within
and makes it lean and temperate;
and disciplined waking alerts the mind
to the sudden ruses of enemies
who lie in wait wolfishly like Dominicans.
For good waking
brings new resources to wayfaring men
so they do not lose the journey with sleeping
or the crown that is owing them in wakefulness.

(Image: "Satan Arousing the Fallen Angels," John Martin, 1824. Awake! Arise! Or be forever ... etc.)

Angel Quires

Afternoon, folks. April was kind to us over at Quill and Quire, with reviews coming out today for both Alice Petersen and Douglas Glover. Of Alice--who has her Montreal launch coming up at Atwater Library on May 7th--they say she "has produced a first collection of stories that, in its depth and quiet wisdom, is reminiscent of the work of another famous Canadian writer named Alice." All the Voices Cry they call "a beautiful tribute to human fragility and the inevitability of change." And of Doug Glover's Attack of the Copula Spiders they say quite simply:

Glover practises what he prays for in others. His own prose is clean and polished, thoughtful and intriguing, accessible yet serious .... erudite books such as Attack of the Copula Spiders are always useful as roadmaps for developing better readers and writers. Now if we could only get the world to read them carefully.

We couldn't agree more.

Don't forget, all you Toronto Bibliofans, that Alex Boyd's launch will start at the Dora Keogh in about 4 hours. Poesy and beer! And for those of you who already have the shakes for our next Toronto event, here's a little shot to steady the nerves. Courtesy of Open Book Toronto and featuring the marvellous Mike Barnes.

Deluge

Today's poem-of-the-day I thought a fitting choice for those of you who may have spent 3.5 hours this weekend watching a) Yul Brynner be fabulous, and b) Charlton Heston grow a beard. The image you see to the side--mercifully not Mr. Heston--is a print by Segbingway called "Out of their Element," and was featured on the cover of Patricia Young's collection. (Segbingway, as I'm sure you all know by now, is the illustrator for our forthcoming Reasonable Ogre by Mike Barnes.) Enjoy!

Deluge

Patricia Young
from Here Come the Moonbathers, 2008

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and they took them wives of all which they chose. – Genesis 6: 1-2

I walked a long way in an old pair of sandals
and when I looked up
I saw the fiery shape of a man
revolving in a field of blue space.

My knees locked, my tongue split like a flame.

In those days the world was immaculate
and devoid of memory.
It was difficult to think
without hearing
the language of birds.

His face emerged slowly,
feature by nascent feature.
And then his neck/chest/thighs –
all perfect, all splendidly formed.

He put on a body of flesh
as though putting on a suit of fine cloth.

Roses bloomed over the dip
of thorny hills and my eye cocked
toward Paradise.

*

Standing in the dark, braiding the horse’s mane,
I felt him lean into the blank
pools of my thoughts. He was
clean intelligence, incandescent.

Sex with an angel?
my sister said, pulling
water from the well, her voice
dipped in arsenic.

I no longer knew what I was –
woman or jackal, fish or flying thing.

*

Where had he come from?

I didn’t know, nor did I ask
if he’d been sent to me as some kind of
balm to the curse of being human.

A restlessness seized him.
He grew pale, spoke of the place he’d forsaken,
his words the same swollen sounds
scratched on the walls outside Eden.
And then the gibberish in his sleep –
the sky bursting open like a goat-skin bottle,
the ark’s wooden doors
slamming shut.

*

Those final days –
walking among the aloe trees,
leaves trembling like my senses.
The nightingale drunk on his beauty.
The giraffe weeping as he passed.
Bees clung to his skin. Everything
from the protozoan to our hybrid son
banging his breakfast bowl on the table
appeared resplendent and tragic.
I understood even the lowest embryo
manifests will, desire, a terrible cunning.

*

Death by drowning.

Should he have warned me, I whom he could not save?
Should he have whispered that last night of love –
When the rains finally come I will pass through your world like the voice of an animal.

Over the Starnbergersee / with a shower of rain

Cruel, schmuel. Welcome to April, friends of the Bibliomanse, which is for dozens of reasons a damn fine month. Anakana Schofield's Malarky was officially brought to bookstores yesterday and feted with Guinness shots and soda bread (pictures to follow); we have launches upcoming for Alex Boyd and Mike Barnes, in Windsor, London, Toronto; Claire Tacon undertakes a criss-crossing country tour, arm-in-arm with Jamella Hagen from Nightwood; and, of course, there are the poets. Oh yes. They're coming out of the woodwork, much like Louisiana termites. There will be plenty of poesy-content this month on Thirsty, but for starters, those versifiers looking to whet their quills might check out the site for National Poetry Writing Month. Don't be put off by the abbreviation (how does one scan NaPoWriMo?): this site brings together the 575-plus poets who have committed to writing and blogging a poem a day for 30 days. We here at the Bibliomanse will be doing something similar, in homage of the month in homage of the season. Check back daily for the best and brightest of the Bibliopoets. And since yesterday was (fools notwithstanding!) the true beginning of poetry month, today will be a double feature, beginning with (appropriately enough), a hailing by Norm Sibum. Enjoy, folks. And happy April.

Salvo

Norm Sibum

from The Pangborn Defence (2008)

Quote me, you hosers, the notion that life
Can’t defeat the wise man, the one who’s prepared,
And I’ll respond in the negative and bring
Chaos theory through your doors.
Disparage fortune as a flaky goddess,
Whim of some poet’s capering caprice,
And to the drift that chance tosses at us,
I’ll say, ‘Patience, you’ll get your innings.’
So now rain and thunder. Now the downpour,
And the leaf-heavy branches lift and fall
And hiss, so many sweepings of castanets.
They’re beyond philosophy’s reach :
The roses blooming against the brick.
But it’s as if something in the American mind
Would gut the flowers of their intricate hells
And build camps of detention in the emptiness.

For more from Norm Sibum (on talking poetry with "young people," and many many many other things): Ephemeris.

This Week on the Biblioasis Translation Blog

We've relaunched the Biblioasis Translation Blog in a new magazine format that we intend to update on an (almost) weekly basis.  This week's content includes:

Douglas Glover's Pedro, the Uncanny: A Note on Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo ( a web exclusive, from Attack of the Copula Spiders)
Mike Barnes, A Real Spaceship From Across
Love Poems: An Interview with Colin Carberry
A selection from Jaime Sabines Love Poems


The new issue of the Biblioasis translation series magazine can be found here.

Forthcoming issues of the translation blog magazine will include an essay by Andrea Labinger on translating Liliana Heker's The End of the Story, alongside the first chapter of this latest Biblioasis Translation Series title; an essay by Goran Simic, from CNQ's translation issue, On Exile; Zach Wells's Spanish translations; an excerpt from Catherine Mavrikakis's Flowers of Spit (Book Thug), alongside an interview with the author; alongside contributions from Steven Heighton, Hugh Halzelton, David Helwig, Colin Carberry and many others.  

Introducing the Biblioasis International Translation Series Website

We're pleased to launch the new online home of the Biblioasis International Translation Series website and blog over at www.biblioasistranslation.com.  You can find excerpts, reviews and further information on all current and forthcoming Biblioasis translation series titles on this site, which is also accessible through the Biblioasis Press website.

We have also started a Translation series blog, which we hope can become a key resource for anyone interested in translation in Canada.  It will not be Biblioasis-title specific, but will cover translations from other presses as well, in addition to translation-related news, links, reviews, interviews, excerpts and general commentary.  We'll be bringing in a range of contributors for this blog from both inside and outside the press, so do check in from time to time to see what's new.

Forthcoming content over the next few weeks will include Sheila Fischman's short memoir 'A Life in Translation', an essay by Andrea Labinger on the translation of Liliana Heker's The End of the Story, Mike Barnes's fascinating 'A Spaceship from Across' (from the translation issue of CNQ), as well as contributions from Hugh Hazelton, Colin Carberry and many others.

We are also open to contributions from others: if interested, please email me at dwells@biblioasis.com.

This week's major offering is a talk by translation series editor Stephen Henighan, given at the University of Guelph October 27th, 2011.  Worth reading in its entirety, here is a taste:

On October 27, 2011 , writer Clark Blaise visited  the MacDonald-Stewart Art Gallery in Guelph, Ontario. As a nomadic bicultural author who has spent much of his life translating himself across boundaries (and who is also published by Biblioasis), Blaise provided an apt catalyst for talking about translation, and the Biblioasis International Translation Series.  Here's the talk I delivered at the time. 


                                            THE FALL OF TRANSLATION/ Stephen Henighan


Clark Blaise’s visit to Guelph is an ideal opportunity to talk about translation. There are at least two good reasons for this. The first is that although the translator’s word-by-word struggle is with the different ways in which languages carve up reality, the ultimate goal of literary translation is to carry one culture across a border while balancing it on your shoulders in a way that makes it visible to the culture on the other side of the frontier.   This is exactly what Clark Blaise does in  short stories such as “North,” “I’m Dreaming of Rocket Richard,” and dozens of others; one of the stories in his book Resident Alien is even called “Translation.”  Blaise’s short stories are full of characters who translate their names from Boisvert to Greenwood –  or from Blais to Blaise. 
   
The second reason to talk about translation today is that Mr. Blaise’s publisher, Biblioasis, is the home of the Biblioasis International Translation Series.
   
In 2006 Dan Wells asked me to help him set up and run a series of literary translations with an international flavour. Nobody had ever made a sustained attempt at doing anything like this in Canada.  Canadians were content to let New York and London and a few university presses in the U.S.  decide what got translated into English; to set the tone, the references and the language. This passivity was reinforced by the Canada Council. Where both the United Kingdom and the United States have granting agencies that fund incoming translations, the Canada Council funds English-French or French-English translations within Canada, but does not fund Canadian translations of writers from other countries. Nor does the publisher receive his usual grant to support book publication if the book’s author is not Canadian. In the absence of support for either translation or publication, and given the need to purchase English-language rights to the work from hard-nosed  literary agents in Frankfurt, the cost of publishing translations in Canada is inordinately high. It could be lowered by judicious policy making.  Yet in our desire to strengthen our culture, we have forgotten that in an era of accelerated globalization, strength flows not only from bolstering that which is ours, but also  from forging our own interpretations of the world. Committed to the idea that translations must come from the margins of linguistic cultures as well as from the power centres, the Biblioasis International Translation Series is dedicated to publishing world literature in English in Canada. We believe that translations are the lifeblood of literature, that a language that is not in touch with other linguistic traditions loses its creative vitality, and that the worldwide spread of English makes translation more urgent now than ever before.  
   
Above all, we were aware that there was a lot out there to translate because English is the most insular language in the world. From my own trans-linguistic reading, I was familiar with quantities of good writers whose works were available in half-a-dozen or more languages, yet not in English. Only Arabic-speaking cultures publish fewer translations than Anglophone societies, and the Arabs at least have the excuse that most of their citizens are poor and speak dialects as their mother tongues, which makes it difficult or impossible, without specialized training, for them to read the Classical Arabic in which books are published. English-speaking societies have no excuse for their disdain of the rest of the world’s literature. Many English-speaking countries are among the world’s most prosperous, most of our populations are reasonably well educated, and our literary language is only a heartbeat away from that spoken on the street.  Unfortunately, as the inheritors of the two empires that have dominated the world for the last two hundred years –Great Britain and the United States– speakers of English are infected with the bizarre notion, which prevails nowhere else on earth, that their mother tongue is all they need to know to understand the world.  Commentators invariably cite economics as the culprit for the paucity of translations in English, yet those same commentators tell us that in English-speaking countries economics is based on the market. If the market for translations in English is weak, this suggests the presence of certain innate characteristics in English-speaking culture, one of which is an ingrained disdain of foreigners and what passes for their culture.

For the rst of this talk please visit the blog here.  
   

New Fairy Tales Unearthed

The Guardian reports that 500 new fairy tales have been unearthed in Bavaria, including a new one that they have published online called The Turnip Princess.   A new collection of these tales, to be translated into english, is in process.

Fairy tales seem just about everywhere right now, which is a very good thing for us.  We're getting set to launch our own collection of new fairy tales in late April, from the rather magical pen of Mike Barnes.  The Reasonable Ogre: Tales for the Sick and Well, is going to be a stunning publication: not only does it include twelve fantastic new fables by Mike Barnes which stand up to anything being unearthed in Bavaria (or anywhere else), it's a fully illustrated collection, with 70 drawing from the equally magical pen of Segbingway (two of which are above).  We'll be launching it in Windsor April 24th, and at Type Books in Toronto April 26th, with more events to follow.  For those of you who wish an early peak please visit the book's website.

One of the leading names in the current fairy tale renaissance concurs that Mike's collection is remarkable.  Kate Bernheimer offered this endorsement earlier this week:

If you are looking for that once-upon-a-time feeling, to be captured inside an adventurous book, The Reasonable Ogre will satisfy you over and over. It is a marvel, and a tribute to the power of story. The illustrations and language are so entwined as to be inseparable, and they cast a beautiful spell. Mike Barnes is a real fairy-tale creature: that reasonable ogre you hope to meet, whose intentions are good. 

Books should be in shops everywhere in late April.  A chapbook of the title fable will be making its way to CNQ subscribers next week.